S. E. Asia: Part 2 the Ghastly Legacy of Pol Pot

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Refugees stagger from war zones leaving behind devastated agriculture three miltion Kampucheans died under the Pol Pot regime.

Probably an exact estimate will never now be made but there can be no doubt that the slaughter and suffering were almost unimaginable.

If these estimates, which the puppet Heng Samrin regime (installed by the Vietnamese army in December of 1978) gives, are correct then this would mean that in the three years of Pol Pot between one quarter and two fifths of the population died.

According to the evidence of refugees and the very few observers from outside who were in Kampuchea at the time the commonest causes of death were famine and exhaustion on the one hand and murder by agents of the Pol Pot regime on the other.

Death camp

The whole country was converted into a death camp. Evidence which would be hard to refute is now being presented by the occupying Vietnamese forces and the Heng Samrin regime of the existence of extermination camps modelled on those of the Nazis.

Refugees and survivors (the only sources of information which exist) have stated that all priests and intellectuals were more or less indiscriminately murdered by the regime.

But the greatest deaths probably came as a result of the rigours of daily life and work under Pol Pot. Within a few hours of the capture of Phnom Penh from the retreating imperialists in April 1975 the forced evacuation of the city began.

Some reports claim that 2 million of its recently swelled population were forced out in a matter of two days.

Many died on the march to the countryside where Khmer Rouge-operated collective farms were set up. A new working week of ten days 19 days work and one day rest) was established in these labour camps; and survivors have claimed that the working day was often from 3 am. until 11 p.m.

Pol Pot Much has been made of the fact that the Khmer Rouge regime abolished money. In fact this is a half truth since at the time of the fall of Phnom Penh, money had already been virtually abolished by the hyperinflatinn which develoner after EINIQLIUIE 1970 under the Lon Noi regime.

Worthless

This caused the national currency (the riel) to be devalued thousands of times, so that by 1975 it had become worthless.

The Khmer Rouge regime blew up the Central Bank, introduced no currency reform and organised distribution of what few goods were available by administrative measures mostly in the labour camps.

Rations were given out according to work done-but in any case only amounted on average to woefully inadequate quantity of rice (today the ration is only 4 pounds a month).

Virtually the whole population went hungry and that state of generalised famine persists until today.

Critical point

Recent reports from OXFAM and other relief workers suggest that the famine is now reaching its critical point and that there is imminent danger of two million more deaths from starvation unless much more food reached the country very soon.

There is little locally grown food available because of the decimation especially of the male adult population who did most of the agricultural work.

It has been estimated by relief medical workers, and this is confirmed by journalists like Inhn Pilaer of the Daily Mirror that young adults have been almost eliminated; and that of the surviving adult population only 20-30% are male.

In addition medical workers have said that as a result of the effects of the starvation 85% of women of child-bearing age have stopped menstruating, that at present there are ten deaths for every one live birth and that diseases like anthrax and bubonic plague are rife.

Blockade

The Vietnamese occupying forces blame the situation on the Pol Pot regime and they add; correctly, that one of the reasons that supplies of food are not available, is the imperialist blockade imposed on Vietnam and Kampuchea after the invasion of last December.

The puppet Heng Samrin regime has recently put the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial in their absence for "genocide, perversion of adolescents and sabotage of the national economy."

The Khmer Rouge leaders react to these accusations with cynical indifference. The Khmer Rouge President and Foreign Minister Khieu Samphan said a few weeks ago:

"I can assure you that government killed not three, two, nor one million Khmers; it never killed anyone. These are Vietnamese slanders . . .

But Khmer Rouge spokesmen have on other. occasions not denied that the deaths took place. They have blamed them on "excesses of the rank and file and Vietnamese. infiltration"

While it is not possible to take such claims seriously it is still wrong to lay the appalling disaster of the Kampuchean people solely at the door of the Khmer leadership.

Thailand Aranyaprathet Battambang PHNOM PENH Güif of Siam The Kampuchean people were cruelly oppressed by French colonialism. Then the deadly process continued under the corrupt leadership of the hereditary Prince Sihanouk who, pure as he would like to appear today, nonetheless pursued policies of repression towards the masses in the 1960s.

The gigantic tragedy of Kampuchea was all the more severe because it hit a country which to begin with was one of the most backward on earth.

When the Khmer Rouge is justly accused of ending medical services and education along with all other marks of civilisation, it must not be forgotten how little of these already existed in Kampuchea before 1975.

For instance, there was in 1971 only one doctor for every 15,000 people; and virtually none of the doctors were in the countryside where the great majority of Kampucheans lived.

The legacy of French imperialism and the corrupt, reactionary puppet regime which succeeded it was that in 1970 Kampuchea had what was estimated to be the lowest standard of living of any country in the world.

Then from 1970 to 1975 Kampuchea was bombarded by Nixon's planes with an amount of explosives equivalent to five Hiroshimas. It was that, as much as the policies of Pol Pot which destroyed Kampuchean agriculture and sent millions of refugees fleeing to the cities.

There was, therefore, an element of rationality about a policy in 1975 of trying to restore agricultural production and of dispersing some of the millions of urban refugees back to the cities.

In the hands of the Khmer Rouge leadership however, this element of rationality was almost totally smothered by the more or less depraved and brutal way in which the disperal of population was carried out.

Some observers have concluded that the only explanation of the barbaric events was that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were psycopaths.

Even if there is some truth in this, it cannot be taken as a political explanation of how a whole political leadership carried out policies of this kind.

Part of Kampuchea's deadly road to barbarism must be explained by the way in which the revolutionary struggle of the Kampuchean people from 1970, and even before, was isolated from the rest of the world.

Laos mites 100 This extreme isolation, though in part fomented by the Khmer Rouge leaders, was mostly the responsibility of the international Stalinist leaders in Moscow, Hanoi, and even in Peking, which opportunistically became the Khmer Rouge's ally., These Stalinist leaders starved the Kampuchean fighters of aid. They betrayed the Kampuchean revolution in the accords of 1954 and again in 1973.

And the claims today by the Vietnamese and Soviet regimes that they have liberated" Kampuchea from tyranny are hypocritical. They did not reveal or condemn the crimes of the Pol Pot regime before they invaded. And they are doing so now only to justify that invasion.

It must, however, be accepted that if the Vietnamese occupying forces at present wished to begin to reverse the tragedy of the Kampuchean people it would be very difficult because of the hostile policies of imperialism.

At the same time some attention must be given to a number of reports from refugees who in their tens of thousands are attempting to leave Kampuchea, that Heng Samrin and the Vietnamese are pursuing policies which suggest they too are continuing the destruction of the Kampuchean nation.

In the rural areas they have tried to reorganise the virtually destroyed agricultural system (only 5% of the land is now being cultivated) by setting up groups of 10-25 farming families each with 2 hectares of land in cooperatives.

Refugees have reported, however, that these renovated areas are not being given to the destitute Kampucheans but are being colonised by Vietnamese and Khmers Krom (Khmers from the delta area in Vietnam).

Accusations of this kind have also been stridently taken up by the bureaucracy in Peking; they parallel the Vietnamese propaganda which says that the Pol Pot regime had a similar plan to install Chinese settlers in Kampuchean territory.

Such accusations against the Vietnamese cannot at present be verified. But they would be consistent with policies within Vietnam itself which contemplate the emigration of 3 million of the population.

These policies and the position of the "boat people" will be discussed in a third article on recent events in IndoChina in next week's Socialist Press.

Imperialist bombardment of Cambodia

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